Much has been written about Monday's inauguration of 681.stm" target="_blank"&gt;Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, and how it will be represented in political history. It's also going to be looked on as a key moment of the digital age. With millions of people descending on the Capitol in Washington all carrying a smartphone, there is a huge repository of imagery, video and both public and private messages, texts and emails for historians to pour over.

Major information overload alert. We all know what happened at the inauguration, it was all fairly straightforward. Repeating the same info over and over and over again ad nauseum is not going to do anyone any good.

*However*, where lots and lots of different sources of info come into extremely good use, i.e. you can't really get enough of them, is where 'unusual' events happen, and one wants to find out the real truth. So, I'm thinking JFK's assasination, the different events on 9/11 in the US, and indeed 7/7 in the UK, and the recent brid-strike downing of the jet into the Hudson river. In the case of the first 2 examples, many more sources of info would do a lot potentially to refute or support the conspiracy theories that have very legitimately grown up around these seminal events. But even in more everyday occurrences when more info is needed than "official" sources can supply, the more info the better - video, audio, you name it.

Just because a recording has been made doesn't automatically mean it is of any value or interest. Just look at all those cameraphone clips of gigs on youtube to see just how worthless 90% of it is.

Good content needs to provide something new. The problem with most amateur content is the lack of perspective or context it has. The most famous news images are taken by talented photographers and selected by talented picture editors, and they bring a whole lot more to the story than a straight document of what happened.

By contrast the vast majority of photos and videos taken the other will involve nothing more than someone holding their phone in the air and pointing it in the general direction of the action. The people who took it will no doubt treasure it, but it has no need to be seen by anyone else, ever.

Just because a recording has been made doesn't automatically mean it is of any value or interest. Just look at all those cameraphone clips of gigs on youtube to see just how worthless 90% of it is.

True, but which 90%?

For different people different bits of video will be of interest, and for historians even the most boring detail may be highly significant.

For example, what if someone in the 1970s had videoed Obama dancing at a disco? Back then it would have been nothing, but now it would be of great interest (especially if he had an embarassing haircut).

The problem is that we don't know in advance what will become of interest in the future, so it's probably a good idea to preserve as much content as possible in some kind of archive.

Quote:

Good content needs to provide something new. The problem with most amateur content is the lack of perspective or context it has. The most famous news images are taken by talented photographers and selected by talented picture editors, and they bring a whole lot more to the story than a straight document of what happened.

I've heard this argument put forward by professionals, and I can see what they're saying, but I don't think it's true when it comes to creating non-fiction content.

For example, professionals aren't always on the scene of an event. Zapruder's film of the JFK assassination is so valuable despite his amateur status purely because he was in the right place at the right time.

And even in everyday life, simply recording particular events can be good enough, even if the recording has been done in a poor manner. Once a way of life disappears, all the recordings of that way of life become precious in a way they weren't before.

Fictional content is totally different though, as far as film-making goes I agree that professionals tend to create far more compelling content than amateurs. Some amateurs are good, but almost all the fiction people actually want to watch/read/listen to has been made by someone who got paid for it.

Analysis of news events also tends to be better when done by professionals, though the analysis can include content created by amateurs (such as the photographs that passers-by took of the plane that crashed in the Hudson river).